Category: reader

Facebook Switching To HTTPS By Default

Trailrunner7 writes “Facebook this week will begin turning on secure browsing be default for its millions of users in North America. The change will make HTTPS the default connection option for all Facebook sessions for those users, a shift that gives them a good baseline level of security and will help prevent some common attacks. Facebook users have had the option of turning on HTTPS since early 2011 when the company reacted to attention surrounding the Firesheep attacks. However, the technology was not enabled by default and users have had to opt-in and manually make the change in order to get the better protection of HTTPS.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Switching To HTTPS By Default

Internet Cafe Webmaster Steals Internet From Internet Cafe

An internet cafe webmaster in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, Guangdong, was recently arrested for stealing user information, passwords, and money from the very same internet cafe he was working in. The method of his crime was something that seems like something lifted from the 1999 movie Office Space . More »

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Internet Cafe Webmaster Steals Internet From Internet Cafe

Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhami/ Imagine you’re launching a company and only have six months to deliver a product. You face a competitor that has been in your industry four years longer than you with twice your staff and twice the budget. If you don’t make your deadline, you’re out of business. That, in a nutshell, was the situation facing the technology team for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. The Obama for America (OFA) organization had the advantage: it didn’t have to wade through the primary season first, allowing OFA’s technology team to focus on building an infrastructure. Based on an Ars analysis of the Romney campaign’s financial reports, Romney’s team had less to work with and passed the lion’s share of technology-focused spending directly to advertising companies and telemarketers. This left Team Romney’s tech squad with only a fraction of the budget for consulting, services, and infrastructure. So, the campaign did what a lot of small businesses would do: they went to Best Buy. Or more accurately, they went to Best Buy’s subsidiary, MindShift Technologies, a managed service provider that specializes in small and medium business consulting. And when they were in a pinch for tech help, they called Staples’ subsidiary ThriveNetworks and a collection of small consulting firms with links to Romney and the Republican Party. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends

Reading and Calculating With Your Unconscious

lee1 writes “Using special techniques that present information to one eye while hiding the information from the conscious mind (by masking it with more distracting imagery presented to the other eye), researchers have shown two new and very unexpected things: we can read and understand short sentences, and we can perform multi-step arithmetic problems, entirely unconsciously. The results of the reading and calculating are available to and influence the conscious mind, but we remain unaware of their existence. While we have known for some time that a great deal of sensory processing occurs below the surface and affects our deliberative behavior, it was widely believed until now that the subconscious was not able to actually do arithmetic or parse sentences.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Reading and Calculating With Your Unconscious

GOP Study Committee Director Disowns Brief Attacking Current IP Law

cervesaebraciator writes “Saturday an article was featured on Slashdot which expressed some hope, if just a fool’s hope, that a recent Republican Study Committee Brief could be a sign of broader national discussion about the value of current copyright law. When one sees such progress, credit is deservedly given. Unfortunately, others in Washington did not perhaps see this as worthy of praise. The committee’s executive director, Paul Teller, sent a memo today disavowing the earlier pro-copyright reform brief. From the memo: ‘Yesterday you received a Policy Brief or [sic] copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard. Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand.’ People who live in districts such as Ohio’s 4th would do well to send letters of support to those who crafted the original brief. I cannot imagine party leadership will be happy with so radical a suggestion as granting copyright protection for the limited times needed to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GOP Study Committee Director Disowns Brief Attacking Current IP Law

MediaPortal 2 – Alpha 1 Autumn release

Team MediaPortal is proud to release yet another alpha of the upcoming HTPC revolution MediaPortal 2! A lot of work has been done since the summer release of MediaPortal 2. Here is a short collection of changes: New Plugins News Plugin Party Music Player Utilities Skin improvements New movie layout (Reflexion) VideoBackground (Reflexion) (Check video below!) Improved readability in content area (Reflexion) New background (RisingSkin) Style rework (RisingSkin) New features and improvements Better series and movie lookup: Reading metadata from nfo files Support for movie collections Different PiP strategies: user can select if the current video should be “parked” in PiP, or will stay the fullscreen player (old way) MovieThumbnailer creates thumbnails for videos where windows shell method fail (based on ffmpeg) Added password control to SkinEngine Added render events and statistics renderer plugin (F10 to enable stats, F11 toggle render strategies) Online lookups (series, movies, weather) don’t block MP2 when no network connection is available Videoplayer now support dvr-ms and wtv format Extended and fixed Fanart service Further information & support If you are looking for further information please check out  MediaPortal 2 wiki  first. We are heavily working to improve it. If you don’t find an answer there create a new thread in  MediaPortal 2 forums . If you found a bug, please check  Mantis  &  Continue Reading

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MediaPortal 2 – Alpha 1 Autumn release

The Patron Saint of the Internet

Pope John Paul II nominated Saint Isidore of Seville to be the patron saint of the internet, although the Vatican has not officially designated him so …yet. These things take time. Why St. Saint Isidore? Saint Isidore wrote a 20 book opus Etymologies, also known as the Origins, in which he tried to record everything that was known. Published after his death in 636, it was for a thousand years considered the encyclopedia of all human knowledge. Written in simple Latin, it was all a man needed in order to have access to everything he wanted to know about the world but never dared to ask, from the 28 types of common noun to the names of women’s outer garments. It was a tool by those seeking wisdom much like the internet is used now. There’s even a prayer asking St. Isidore for guidance while surfing the net. Link   -via mental_floss

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The Patron Saint of the Internet